So many cherries! I picked so many cherries. Seriously, close to 100 lbs of cherries. By day 3 of processing them I was wondering what possessed me to bring home quite so many. It was at this point I began to give some away to the neighbors.
Cherries are a delight in early summer. They are one of the first fruits to come on and they just make me relive all of the many hours spent as a kid climbing in the cherry tree picking cherries and spitting out the pits onto my sisters who were picking on lower limbs.
But when you aren’t just picking a few do eat, pitting cherries can really be the pits! This is where a cherry pitter comes in handy. When I got home from picking cherries with that many cherries, Dave said, “If you don’t buy yourself a cherry pitter, I am getting you one!” And I am so glad we bought one.
I picked it up at the local IFA farm store, although they can be found in many locations, even off Amazon. My cherries needed processing asap so I wasn’t going to wait around to have one shipped to me. It was worth the $25 and the extra trip into town.
The pitter was easy to assemble and the directions were easy to follow. Once I got it put together I tried out the suction bottom that makes it stay put on the counter. It stuck well!
On the box it claims that the pitter can handle several pounds of cherries an hour. Depending on how many you have and the kind of stamina your arm has this is very true. I timed myself while pitting and was able to hit a top speed of 75 cherries a minute. I cannot keep that up for very long!
The Victorio Cherry Pitter comes with a little pit catcher cup that slides in the bottom. I found it necessary to dump this cup after about each set of 100 cherries pitted. If I forgot the pitter still worked, but when I went to dump the pit cup, there would be cherry pits falling out everywhere and stuck in every cranny of the machine.
The pitter worked great, and saved soooo much time, but it was messy! After just a minute or two there was a puddle of cherry juice on my counter top that continued to grow with each cherry. It has quite the splash zone as well. My walls and microwave were spattered in cherry juice as were my apron and glasses. Against one wall there is still some cherry juice I need to wash off 4 feet above the counter height.
The Victorio Cherry Pitter was also difficult to clean. The cherries left a redish brown residue on the white plastic that would come off when scrubbed with warm soapy water, but there is a lot of area up inside the pitter that is hard to reach and clean. The cherry pieces and pits rinse out pretty easy but to actually scrub the residue out of there is difficult. I used a toothbrush and baby bottle brush and it came pretty clean but not quite as clean and I would want.
Overall I am very pleased with the product. It cut time like nobody’s business even if it was quite messy. Pitting cherries is a time consuming task even with a pitter to speed up the process. It took me 5 days to finally be finished processing the cherries. I can’t imagine the amount of time if I had pitted them with a knife!